Tag Archives: reusable bag

you believe you are doing all you can for the environment. you recycle. you use the right light bulbs. you use your reusable shopping bags. maybe you’ve even embraced meatless mondays or went vegan or vegetarian. but according to jonathan bloom, there is one more simple thing you can do to help the environment: stop wasting food.

this isn’t only about wasting food. it’s about wasting the fossil fuel that went into growing, processing, transporting and refrigerating it. a conservative estimate is that nearly 2% of all u.s. energy consumption goes to producing food that was never eaten.

from his op-ed in today’s l.a. times:

To give you a sense of perspective, every year, through uneaten food, we waste 70 times the amount of oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico during the three months of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

then on top of that, add the fuel used to transport that waste to the landfill; the methane that is produced once the food starts decomposing (far worse than carbon dioxide); not to mention the guilt that should come to los angelenos for throwing away 18 million pounds of food per day, while the homeless and the poor in our city are starving or malnourished.

here are some simple things he says we all can do:

• Buy smarter. Plan the week’s dinners and make a detailed shopping list. Stick to the list; don’t buy more food than you can possibly eat before it goes bad. When planning meals, consider your reality. If you often don’t have time to cook dinner after work, don’t shop as if you do. And scheduling a leftover night is always wise.

• Rethink portion size. We have a warped idea of what’s a sensible amount to eat, in part because of what counts as a “serving” at restaurants these days. As a result, we often take or receive too much, prompting us to either overeat or scrape the food we don’t eat into the trash.

• Love your leftovers. If you’ve invested the money, time and energy in cooking, why not save the remaining portion? And remember, saving food only to throw it out a week later defeats the purpose. If you’re not a leftover lover, try halving recipes to prevent excess or repurposing your accumulated extras into another dish.

• Compost! Those of us without dogs (or pigs or goats) will always have some food waste. But we don’t have to send it all to the landfill. Composting, whether by backyard, worm or Bokashi bin or the indoor NatureMill, creates a usable soil amendment rather than methane. That way, you return your food’s nutrients to the soil instead of just throwing them away.

today is the 40th anniversary of earth day and before i post photos from our earth day LA event last weekend, i want to go way back to the beginning of this blog and my post about what “living in a modern world” means to me. the whole philosophy of this blog and of our company is to do the best you can with every choice you make. despite my best efforts, as a lover of modern design, i have purchased items made of plastic. but the biggest culprit endangering our planet is single use plastic: shopping bags, bottled water, straws, packaging, etc. i’m not trying to guilt you into a plastic free life (although i truly admire those who are able to do so), i’m just saying to weigh those purchases in terms of how much you need it, how long you’ll use it and how much you love it. i believe it is the small, collective things we can do as citizens that will make a big difference and inspire corporations to follow suit.

meatless mondays is a perfect example. more and more companies are now offering meatless options and even going completely meatfree on mondays! the positive impact of this tasty action can be potentially huge! across the nation, many cities are now banning plastic bags. from the small things we all can do, these changes will ripple outward into true and lasting benefits for our planet.

it may not make sense to celebrate earth day from the blog of a consumer goods company and i know there is a lot of greenwashing out there – everybody is trying to jump on the wagon! but despite some of these claims, i am happy that we are all thinking about the 3Rs of reduce, reuse and recycleand that corporations (while motivated by profits) realize that they, too, must start thinking about their impact upon the earth.

we live in a world of plastic and that plastic is killing our world. as you may know, a portion of our profits will be donated to 5 gyres and the surfrider foundation. all we want is to do our part to make a tiny difference for this beautiful, fragile place we call home. we hope our bags will be a stylish replacement for all those plastic and polypropylene bags – when properly cared for, our bags will last more than 10 years! i don’t want this to sound like an advertisement, it’s just that this blog has been up for about six months now and some of you may not know what modernest is all about.

so, onto the photos!

thank you to all our friends who have been so supportive and to all our new friends and clients we have met along the way!

after an especially harsh winter (even in l.a.!), i am so excited to see the first cherry blossoms coming into bloom. growing up, the first days of spring were always happy times at our house. most years, my mother would prepare a lovely picnic for us to take to the park or go for a hike up in the mountains and we would just sit and appreciate nature’s renewal and rebirth.

image from modernest.com (of course!)

so, it is only fitting that modernest’s debut collection would include a cherry blossom bag (featuring a lovely illustration by my über talented boyfriend).

how i wish we had the time and money to travel d.c. or san francisco where we have friends to stay with and see the cherry blossom festivals in full swing…maybe next year. but for now, i will be happy to tote around a bit of that springtime spirit and with it, appreciation for my mom instilling in us an optimism that life, like nature, is always changing…